Putting newbies on Reports. Beneficial/Harmful? [closed]

Question

In my work experience, most fresh out of school programmers are set right to creating reports for 6-12 months or so. While I see the benefit of doing something non-crucial, it seems to really discourage them.

So my question is, should organizations allow newbies to work with someone experienced right off the bat, obviously doing non-critical phases of a project, do get a real feel for what their career choice has in stock, or throw them on reports out of the gate?

Answer 1

Ah, there really is nothing like exploiting interns for remedial jobs...

Seriously though, you get back what you put in. Forcing them to do a thoughtless, thankless job for a long period of time is a quick way to build up a useless team member.

Answer 2

Perhaps they should be looking for a job at different companies? Maybe they shouldn't settle?

I was once a fresh-grad, and I have never been asked to work on a report. I had a programming check-in within the first 5 days of my job.

Maybe I am confused about the question. We are talking about folks who apply for programming positions and are sent to doing "reports" related job?!

Answer 3

I didn't start in "reports". I started on a conversion -- just get stuff to run on the new platform. Relatively safe, minor programming changes.

Then I did some new development for a while.

Then another conversion.

Then -- 2 years into my career -- no longer a complete n00b -- I wound up in "Reports". They wanted something like a dozen dumb-as-dirt accounting reports. Each was a "pull from the general ledger", "do some quick math" and "write a columnar report". [It was 1980, that's how stuff was done.]

I couldn't stand to do copy-and-paste programming. So I wrote a thing that extracted from the ledger into an array of values. It used a flexible notation for doing calculations on values in that array, then it wrote out the results of the calculations.

It could add, subtract, multiply and divide. You could use multiple operations on a series of "cells" to compute wonderfully complex things. To a limit.

I had invented the spreadsheet, built as a COBOL batch program. Seriously. That's what putting someone on reports can lead to. A single program that produced the dozen dumb-as-dirt financial reports. And a large number of additional reports, too.

Bonus. It was built in an Agile, incremental fashion. The first version did a half-dozen of the really easy reports. The next one did two or three more.

I don't think "reports" is a bad gig. What's bad is forcing people to copy and paste yet another dumb-as-dirt report program from a cookie-cutter template.